bitnami-containers/bitnami/rails

Bitnami Secure Image for Rails

What is Rails?

Rails is a web application framework running on the Ruby programming language.

Overview of Rails Trademarks: This software listing is packaged by Bitnami. The respective trademarks mentioned in the offering are owned by the respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation or endorsement.

TL;DR

Local workspace

docker run --name rails bitnami/rails:latest

Warning: This quick setup is only intended for development environments. You are encouraged to change the insecure default credentials and check out the available configuration options for the MariaDB container for a more secure deployment.

Why use Bitnami Secure Images?

Those are hardened, minimal CVE images built and maintained by Bitnami. Bitnami Secure Images are based on the cloud-optimized, security-hardened enterprise OS Photon Linux. Why choose BSI images?

• Hardened secure images of popular open source software with Near-Zero Vulnerabilities
• Vulnerability Triage & Prioritization with VEX Statements, KEV and EPSS Scores
• Compliance focus with FIPS, STIG, and air-gap options, including secure bill of materials (SBOM)
• Software supply chain provenance attestation through in-toto
• First class support for the internet’s favorite Helm charts

Each image comes with valuable security metadata. You can view the metadata in our public catalog here. Note: Some data is only available with commercial subscriptions to BSI.

If you are looking for our previous generation of images based on Debian Linux, please see the Bitnami Legacy registry.

Supported tags and respective Dockerfile links

Learn more about the Bitnami tagging policy and the difference between rolling tags and immutable tags in our documentation page.

You can see the equivalence between the different tags by taking a look at the tags-info.yaml file present in the branch folder, i.e bitnami/ASSET/BRANCH/DISTRO/tags-info.yaml.

Subscribe to project updates by watching the bitnami/containers GitHub repo.

Introduction

Ruby on Rails, or simply Rails, is a web application framework written in Ruby under MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages.

The Bitnami Rails Development Container has been carefully engineered to provide you and your team with a highly reproducible Rails development environment. We hope you find the Bitnami Rails Development Container useful in your quest for world domination. Happy hacking!

Learn more about Bitnami Development Containers.

Getting started

The quickest way to get started with the Bitnami Rails Development Container is using docker-compose.

Begin by creating a directory for your Rails application:

mkdir ~/myapp
cd ~/myapp

Download the docker-compose.yml file in the application directory:

curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bitnami/containers/main/bitnami/rails/docker-compose.yml

Finally launch the Rails application development environment using:

docker-compose up

Among other things, the above command creates a container service, named myapp, for Rails development and bootstraps a new Rails application in the application directory. You can use your favourite IDE for developing the application.

Note

If the application directory contained the source code of an existing Rails application, the Bitnami Rails Development Container would load the existing application instead of bootstrapping a new one.

After the WEBrick application server has been launched in the myapp service, visit http://localhost:3000 in your favourite web browser and you'll be greeted by the default Rails welcome page.

In addition to the Rails Development Container, the docker-compose.yml file also configures a MariaDB service to serve as the database backend of your Rails application.

Executing commands

Commands can be launched inside the myapp Rails Development Container with docker-compose using the exec command.

Note:

The exec command was added to docker-compose in release 1.7.0. Please ensure that you're using docker-compose version 1.7.0 or higher.

The general structure of the exec command is:

docker-compose exec <service> <command>

, where <service> is the name of the container service as described in the docker-compose.yml file and <command> is the command you want to launch inside the service.

Following are a few examples of launching some commonly used Rails development commands inside the myapp service container.

• List all available rake tasks:

  docker-compose exec myapp bundle exec rake -T
  

• Get information about the Rails environment:

  docker-compose exec myapp bundle exec rake about
  

• Launch the Rails console:

  docker-compose exec myapp rails console
  

• Generate a scaffold:

  docker-compose exec myapp rails generate scaffold User name:string email:string
  

• Run database migrations:

  docker-compose exec myapp bundle exec rake db:migrate
  

Note

Database migrations are automatically applied during the start up of the Rails Development Container. This means that the myapp service could also be restarted to apply the database migrations.

docker-compose restart myapp

Environment variables

Customizable environment variables

Name	Description	Default Value
RAILS_ENV	Rails environment mode.	development
RAILS_SKIP_ACTIVE_RECORD	Skip active record configuration.	no
RAILS_SKIP_DB_SETUP	Skip database configuration.	no
RAILS_SKIP_DB_WAIT	Skip waiting for database to be ready.	no
RAILS_RETRY_ATTEMPTS	Rails retry attempts.	30
RAILS_DATABASE_TYPE	Database server type.	mariadb
RAILS_DATABASE_HOST	Database server host.	mariadb
RAILS_DATABASE_PORT_NUMBER	Database server port.	3306
RAILS_DATABASE_NAME	Database name.	bitnami_myapp

Read-only environment variables

FIPS configuration in Bitnami Secure Images

The Bitnami Rails Docker image from the Bitnami Secure Images catalog includes extra features and settings to configure the container with FIPS capabilities. You can configure the next environment variables:

• OPENSSL_FIPS: whether OpenSSL runs in FIPS mode or not. yes (default), no.

Configuring your database

You can configure the MariaDB hostname and database name to use for development purposes using the environment variables DATABASE_HOST & DATABASE_NAME.

For example, you can configure your Rails app to use the development-db database running on the my-mariadb MariaDB server by modifying the docker-compose.yml file present in this repository:

services:
  myapp:
  ...
    environment:
      - DATABASE_HOST=my-mariadb
      - DATABASE_NAME=development-db
  ...

Running additional services

Sometimes, your application will require extra pieces, such as background processing tools like Resque or Sidekiq.

For these cases, it is possible to re-use this container to be run as an additional service in your docker-compose file by modifying the command executed.

For example, you could run a Sidekiq container by adding the following to the docker-compose.yml file present in this repository:

services:
  ...
  sidekiq:
    image: bitnami/rails:latest
    environment:
      # This skips the execution of rake db:create and db:migrate
      # since it is being executed by the rails service.
      - SKIP_DB_SETUP=true
    command: bundle exec sidekiq
  ...

Note

You can skip database wait period and creation/migration by setting the SKIP_DB_WAIT and SKIP_DB_SETUP environment variables.

Installing Rubygems

To add a Rubygem to your application, update the Gemfile in the application directory as you would normally do and restart the myapp service container.

For example, to add the httparty Rubygem:

echo "gem 'httparty'" >> Gemfile
docker-compose restart myapp

When the myapp service container is restarted, it will install all the missing gems before starting the WEBrick Rails application server.

Notable Changes

6.0.2-2-debian-10-r52

• Decrease the size of the container. The configuration logic is now based on Bash scripts in the rootfs/ folder.

Using docker-compose.yaml

Please be aware this file has not undergone internal testing. Consequently, we advise its use exclusively for development or testing purposes.

If you detect any issue in the docker-compose.yaml file, feel free to report it or contribute with a fix by following our Contributing Guidelines.

Contributing

We'd love for you to contribute to this container. You can request new features by creating an issue or submitting a pull request with your contribution.

Issues

If you encountered a problem running this container, you can file an issue. Be sure to include the following information in your issue:

• Host OS and version
• Docker version (docker version)
• Output of docker info
• Version of this container
• The command you used to run the container, and any relevant output you saw (masking any sensitive information)

License

Copyright © 2025 Broadcom. The term "Broadcom" refers to Broadcom Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.